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August 20, 2013

Today's Featured Title and Contest

August 20, 2013

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book coming out this fall. Read more about it, and enter our Fall Preview Daily Contest by Wednesday, August 21st at 11:59AM ET for a chance to win one of five copies of MY MOTHER'S SECRET: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Storyby J.L. Witterick. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

Our First Featured Book and Contest: MY MOTHER'S SECRET: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J.L. Witterick

Based on a true story, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a profound, captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the clever and "righteous" mother and daughter who teamed up to save them.

Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are unlikely heroines. They are simple people who mind their own business and don't stand out from the crowd. Until 1939, when crisis strikes. The Nazis have invaded Poland and they are starting to persecute the Jews. Providing shelter to a Jew has become a death sentence. And yet, Franciszka and Helena decide to do just that. In their tiny, two-bedroom home in Sokal, Poland, they cleverly hide a Jewish family of two brothers and their wives in their pigsty out back, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen floorboards, and a defecting German soldier in the attic --- each group completely unbeknownst to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commanders standing guard right outside her yard.

Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a reminder that there are, in fact, no profiles of courage and each individual's character is a personal choice.

This book was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who, with her daughter, saved the lives of 15 Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Before the war, there were 6,000 Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only 30 survived the war and half of those did so because of Franciszka.

This is a special newsletter for our Fall Preview Daily Contest, which will mail on select days in August and September. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.